The Lacemaker From both an anthropological and architectural viewpoint, the home had acquired enormous importance in the second half of the 17th century in the Netherlands. Scenes of Dutch domesticity flourished and women were among the most frequently depicted subjects. They reflect concepts that were important to the Dutch culture such as family, privacy, intimacy, comfort and luxury. The new Dutch household had begun to be perceived as the realm and responsibility of woman while the public world, divided for the first time cleanly from it, belonged to the male. Vermeer principally painted women engaged in cultivated leisure (playing musical instruments or letter writing or reading) in order to emphasize their literacy (pictorial tradition suggests the letters his women read are about love but they also speak to a burgeoning ideal of the educated domestic woman). Only two times did he portray them working, in the early Milkmaid and the late Lacemaker. According to a study made by Gary Schwartz and Trudy van den Oosten, working from a database of 3,340 Dutch, Flemish, Italian and Spanish paintings, males comprise about 74% of the figures, women 19% and children 7%. Vermeer painted proportionately more women than his colleagues. However, unlike his colleagues, Vermeer represented no families, no children or no elderly people in his interiors. Some authors have creatively asserted that women dominated the life of Vermeer citing along with the choice of the motifs of women in his painting, a domineering mother-in-law, a household of daughters and at least one strong-willed maid. On the basis of the treatment of his subjects others have psychoanalyzed him as a person who is afraid of women or as a distant father. However, it is far more likely that the unusual proportion of women and their manner of depiction reflect consciously elaborated artistic goals rather than psychological or personal motives. In more than one case, the known lives of some Dutch painters contrasts directly with their preferred subject matter.
Posted on: Wed, 07 May 2014 12:17:08 +0000
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